CDP Training: Where to find Customer Data Platform Courses

Customer data platforms (CDP) have become a foundational technology in the martech stack to support the growing requirements for omnichannel customer experience. But according to recent research from the CDP Institute, companies are facing challenges with selecting and implementing the right CDP.

If you need to fast track your expertise on customer data platforms, this list of CDP training resources will help you and your team get started.

What Is a CDP? Everything You Need to Know About CDPs

If you’re looking for a complete overview of customer data platforms, then you’ll appreciate this in-depth resource, What Is a CDP: The Complete Guide.

This guide kicks off with a definition of a customer data platform, its core functionality, the types and formats of data it collects, customer data platform architecture, integrations, how it unifies the data, and then analyzes and helps you activate it.

It then dives into who uses a CDP (hint: everyone does) and looks at the most common CDP use cases. Plus, some real-world examples allow you to see how others have implemented and benefited from a customer data platform.

But that’s not all. You get a solid review of how a CDP works (data collection, data cleansing, enrichment, segmentation, and more) and a look at essential features around data security, privacy, and compliance.

The guide wraps with great information on measuring the ROI of a CDP, how to get started with selecting and implementing one, and some of the most common deployment pitfalls.

When you are done reading this CDP guide, you’ll have a great understanding of customer data platforms.

CDP Video Guide

A nice complement to the CDP training mentioned above is this 23-minute video, What is a Customer Data Platform (CDP)? [Overview Video].

Learn what is driving the need for customer data platforms and the growth of vendors in the market. There’s also an excellent overview of CDP architecture that describes the different components that comprise a complete customer data platform environment.

If you’re undecided between building or buying a CDP, the video walks you through critical considerations such as time to market, the total cost of ownership, resources required, ongoing updates and maintenance, and security and privacy.

There’s more you’ll learn, but we’ll leave it there. It’s definitely worth the time.

Getting Up to Date on CDPs

Brian Carlson of ROC Consulting and Tom Treanor, CMO at Treasure Data, talk about the disruption in the market today and how CDPs are adapting to the changes in this on-demand webinar, Getting up to date on CDPs. They also discuss why CDPs are essential to future-proofing your organization.

Treasure Data’s CDP Academy

If you’re looking for a customer data platform course, we have the perfect one for you. The Treasure Data CDP Academy offers a mini-course on the fundamentals of working with a CDP. The course includes five modules:

1. CDP 101: Start here for a brief overview of customer data platforms.
2. Collect and Cleanse Customer Data: Learn how to collect data from across your organization and then clean it, transform it, and enrich it with other data types (like second-party data and third-party data).
3. Build Unified Customer Views: The data unification process examines how you bring all your customer data together to build a single unified view and a unique customer ID for each customer.
4. Derive Customer Insights: This module looks at how you leverage AI and ML in the CDP to derive the best customer insights. It talks about attribution, journey orchestration, segmentation, and targeting.
5. Activate and Personalize Marketing: The final module covers activation and personalization of the data in your CDP. Putting the insights to work means improving customer experience, boosting customer acquisition, cross-selling and upselling, leveraging real-time data for micro-moments, and more.

If you want to turn your data into a competitive advantage, then this course will give you the information you need to get started.

The CDP Institute

Another great resource for information on CDPs is the CDP Institute. Many resources are available on the CDP Institute’s website, including information on the different use cases and how to build your use case for a CDP. Plus, you’ll learn about the different vendors and how to develop an RFP to select the right one.

There are also half-day pre-purchase and post-purchase workshops you can sign up for to help you implement a customer data platform successfully. The pre-purchase workshop will help you understand what a CDP is, how you know if you need one, define use cases, and identify your selection process.

The post-purchase workshop is for after you have selected a CDP and now need to deploy it. This workshop helps you identify your specific use cases, explains how to define data requirements and data quality, and talks about what is necessary for a successful deployment.

The CDP Institute also offers private workshops if you’re looking for CDP training specific to your company.

CDP from the Analysts

Customer data platforms are popular with technology analysts. Here are a couple of resources to guide you through your CDP training.

Gartner

Gartner offers some CDP resources that will help you improve your understanding of CDPs.

This one is for Gartner clients:

• Survey Analysis: Customer Data Platform Use Is High, Yet Customer Data Management Challenges Persist

And these two are free:

• Marketing Technology Survey: How are marketers investing, deploying, and getting value from their CDP implementations.
• Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing 2020: See where CDPs lie on the hype cycle.

See more Garnter CDP Resources and Magic Quadrant information.

The RealStoryGroup (TRS)

Offerings from The RealStoryGroup include:

• Webinar: How to Select the Right Customer Data Platform: Tony Byrne takes you through the CDP market and provides a methodology you can use to help select the right platform for your business needs.
• [On-Demand Briefing] CDP in Your Stack: Alternative Architectural Models: Tony Byrne and Apoorv Durga look at the different architectures for customer data platforms and leave you with a set of questions and ideas to discuss with your team, so you are better prepared to scope your CDP initiative.
• Customer Data Platform Research: This paid report gives you an in-depth look at the 31 CDP vendors.

Additional CDP Training Resources

Let’s wrap things up with a few additional CDP training resources you can look at to further your understanding.

1. The Martech Alliance will be offering a CDP training course complete with a certificate. You can sign up here to get notified when it’s available.
2. Earley Information Science is a consultancy that held a webinar called The Customer Data Platform–A Path to a Unified Customer Experience.
3. This one is a few years old, but it is a panel discussion with David Raab of the CDP Institute and two companies that use CDPs. You’ll learn how CDPs compare to other marketing systems and hear real implementation stories.
4. Another one with David Raab and Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec). Raab joined Brinker on The Martec Show to talk about CDPs and share insights from the CDP Institute Member Survey.

Ready to Kick Off Your CDP Training?

So there you have it, a list of resources to help you learn more about customer data platforms. Some are high level; others get into the nitty-gritty of how a CDP works and how to select the best one for your business requirements.

Happy CDP training!